


Voice of Reason (Tell Me Another One)

by Prinzenhasserin



Category: Gentleman Bastard Sequence - Scott Lynch
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 08:38:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17019378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prinzenhasserin/pseuds/Prinzenhasserin
Summary: Jean doesn't like it when Locke flirts with red-headed women, and he likes it even less when it leads to Locke being injured.





	Voice of Reason (Tell Me Another One)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sath/gifts).



 

There had been something fishy about this con from the beginning, and it wasn’t coming from the sewage water they were currently wading through.

Jean should have understood what was happening from the beginning. After all, he knew Locke. He was friends with him, even, though the _why_ of that relationship currently escaped him. Locke had been recalcitrant about telling him much more than the basics, which _hadn’t_ included running from someone’s gods-forsaken guards, as usual, but he’d been suspiciously edgy about Jean going back to the house to get all the most important accoutrements, like money and his trusted knives. He had assumed this paranoia was due to the Bondsmagi still somehow keeping their eyes on him, and hadn’t thought to question it. Now, he was paying the price.

He dumped the sad sack that was Locke’s body into the boat— he tried to be gentle, but he was exhausted from trekking to the place he had anchored his borrowed boat, rushing all the way to the sewer system, trying to outrun the private army the wealthiest man of the city owned. Because of course Locke would start a fight he couldn’t win right when they were on the run from an even bigger threat. "It’s only going to be a quick money-grab!" he muttered, mimicking the way Locke had talked him into the entire thing.

Locke didn’t even protest the complaint. He was hanging over the edge of the thing that could’ve been called a boat at one time but now was just too sad to warrant the name. Jean couldn’t tell for sure in the darkness of the tunnels, but he was most likely bleeding into the contaminated water, just as he had bled all over Jean, making his grip slippery and unsteady.

There was no prize that was worth this. Locke wasn’t worth it—he should’ve left the fucking shit to the Bondsmagi, nay, to the fucking Duke of Camorr’s yellow jackets back when Locke was all of three bottles high.

Jean stepped into the boat, and tried not to overturn the much-patched vessel. It kept floating, but only barely. Angrily, he began rowing the boat through the sludgy water, trying not to breathe through his nose. He had bought the small boat at the last minute from one of the gondoliers who made their living ferrying people across the wetlands and swamps, usually at the nicer spots. This specific gondolier apparently also made his living from scamming people by selling them leaky boats—Jean would have bought from a more well-off merchant, one who would stake their good name on a purchase like this, but Locke had needed help as soon as humanly possible. And now, sewage water was slowly seeping into the boat.

The canals of this city had been well-built, back when the ancients roamed. The walls of the tunnels were faintly lit with ember-glow, just enough that people traversing could make out basic shapes. Nobody had used the sewers to travel in a long time, however, and they hadn’t been maintained well. Jean kept rowing.

There was a crossways coming up, which Jean only knew because he’d chatted up the city guard with an interest in the local waterways who had been in charge of granting their entry visas. Locke had told him off about that, later, once they had gotten through clean, because that had meant the guard would remember Jean’s face, or at least his muscles. But now Locke was moaning into the side of the boat, and Jean was glad that he had flirted.

The gates of the lock appeared in the distance. Jean couldn’t make out a guard house in the dark, but shouted for the lock-keeper anyway. "Excuse me, please! Could you open the gates? I’m getting my syphilis-riddled brother to the doctor living in the swamp, since the city-lickers have washed their hands of him, and I don’t want him to infect anyone else!"

"What’s that?" a woman stuck her head out of the gatehouse, clearly not the appointed guard. "Syphilis? I’ll open the doors immediately."

"Thank you, ma’am, very much obliged. I’d cart him to the nearest graveyard, but the priests frown on burying people who still moan."

She let out a cackling sound of laughter. "If they didn’t, I’d have buried my useless husband long ago in one of his alcoholic stupors," she shouted back. Her voice echoed back through the half-tunnel of the sewers. It didn’t give the place a nicer atmosphere.

The gates of the lock opened slowly. Jean looked back and with relief saw that nobody had caught up with them yet. Possibly, they didn’t even know the sewers were traversable. Not a lot of people outside of the lowest underbelly thieves and those responsible for the upkeep of the sewers were keen to travel through the stinking pile of shit.

"Well, get in there, then," the woman said, "the faster you’re in, the faster you’re out."

"That’s what she said," Locke murmured, retching over the side of the boat.

Jean only hoped that it wasn’t loud enough for their lock-keeper to hear.

Slowly, the chamber was flooded with water. In the low light, it looked like magic ,even though Jean knew the mechanics behind the locks. The harbor of Camorr had had many locks, though usually they weren’t used to keep the water level, but rather, to keep the riff-raff contained to their part of the city.

The lock doors opened again, two feet above the waterline of the first tunnel. The stench of the sewers was getting weaker as they got farther away from the opera house in the city center. Jean wasn’t sure if their pursuers had figured out the route they were taking—he only hoped their cover stories would hold up long enough until Locke could pretend he was a normal person again.

"Left at the next crossing," Locke said, wrong as usual. Jean didn’t know why he deserved a companion like Locke, but assumed he must have done something to really piss off the Crooked Warden. No other god could be so petty as to saddle him with that kind of nuisance.

"Keep your blood inside your body, and then I will listen to you plan out escape routes," Jean said, and pulled harder on the oars. Of course, he was rowing against the current. The oars also didn’t match the boat, because why would they? Jean hadn’t thought to check right then and there that he would also be able to navigate the boat—and then it turned out that was a mistake.

"It’s going to be your fault if we get caught by the guards." Locke slurred the words, as if he were drunk. Jean wasn’t worried about his shitty friend, not at all. He could die in the sewer for all Jean cared.

"They’re not guards," Jean said. He didn’t know why he was breathing so hard—his arms were strong enough to row a measly five miles, and it was just him and Locke, at that. "It’s a private army."

Locke didn’t reply because he was busy retching into the water again. Head trauma, Jean suspected, but considering that, he was unexpectedly lucid. Although maybe Locke was the one person in the world who could fluently talk himself out of the shit he got into even with major head trauma caused by a fall from the second story of a home. What did Jean know?

"You’re angry," Locke noted when he lifted his head after puking his guts into the water.

"No, I’m not fucking angry, why would I be angry? You just decided to humiliate the richest man of the city, probably the continent! We’re on the run from fucking Bondsmagi, and of course you have to antagonize the only man in the general area with comparable resources because his wife was a redhead! You couldn’t pick a redhead with a less powerful husband, huh? Remember how awful it was to escape the Bondsmagi in the first place? Fucking vultures."

"It wasn’t because his wife was a redhead," Locke said sulkily.

Jean kept rowing. It wasn’t worth responding to.

"It might’ve been because she was a redhead," Locke admitted. "But it was mostly because I heard he had a ward on his home that can keep out Bondsmagi."

"You heard it from his redheaded wife, who wanted to impress you, because you just couldn’t resist flirting, could you. And you didn’t even consider why she had let that slip, did you? Because as soon as a redhead appears, your brain goes floating out of the window."

Locke coughed over the side of the boat again. He was clearly faking, but then his hacking cough turned into wheezing. That, he wasn’t faking. Just like Locke to pretend he was dying to get out of an argument, when he was actually dying. Jean fumed and funneled his anger into more rowing.

Out of the sewage tunnels, they emerged into the swamp lands. Dawn was breaking, which provided more illumination than the sparse light of the embers built into the tunnel walls. The smell, however, changed only marginally—the scent of decaying human waste turned to the scent of decaying plant matter, and the difference was only slight. Here, a local bonesetter had set up his practice for people escaping the law.

It was a social connection from the past. Jean had known him during his apprentice years, when Father Chains had sent him to explore the lands. He had been a fellow soldier and friend of Father Chain’s, but Jean trusted him only so far as Locke could throw him.

For a few terrifying moments, Jean thought he had missed his turn, and then the ramshackle building emerged out of the thicket of swamp grass and low trees. It was just as bad as Jean remembered, coming apart at the corners and yet inexplicably holding up the thatched roofing.

The landing stage was more or less just a sandbank overgrown with grass, but there was a mooring with a rope attached to it, even though it looked more like a weathered granite stone dumped into the middle of nowhere. Jean pulled the boat in, wrapped his best knots around it, and hoped no intrepid squirrel was going to make away with it. He had to pull the boat in to fasten it to the second mooring, to counteract the current.

Then he heaved Locke onto his shoulders and carried him to the door of the hut.

"Anyone home?" Jean yelled, then pushed the door open. It snagged on a hangnail that looked to be obstructing the door on purpose, but it was a matter of seconds to straighten it out from the outside.

The inside was empty. He would have suspected the hut abandoned, if there hadn’t been a basket of hot coal smoldering away in one corner, next to two buckets of water and a kettle. Overhead hung a string decorated with bundles of herbs and strings of cloth. A snakeskin with an attached head was nailed to the opposite wall, possibly the cheapest way to denote the career path of the building’s inhabitant. A few tins and baskets stood next to the stove. Otherwise, aside from a cot layered with rough-looking furs and a table cobbled together from bits and pieces of wood, the hut was empty.

"Great," Jean said, and then heaved Locke onto the furs.

Locke groaned. He complained about the smell of the surroundings, himself and the furs for two full minutes before falling back into the fur. He watched Jean take off his coat and knifes, and inspect the inventory. "What kind of forsaken hell-hole have you dragged me into now?" he said, daintily picking at the fur with two pointed fingers.

"Invalids don’t get to complain about their accommodations," Jean explained, and filled the kettle with water to put on the hot coals. Then, he lit one of the oil lamps hanging next to the door with a stray bit of kindling. The coal basket next to the stove was full, and so he lay another briquette onto the simmering fire, and watched it flame. He turned back to Locke, who hadn’t moved and yet looked winded. "Now come on, let me see the damage."

"No." Locke crossed his arms, winced, and then uncrossed them again. "You’re only going to poke my wounds and make disapproving noises. I’m fine."

Jean crossed his own arms and stared at him. Behind him on the stove, the kettle was sizzling.

Locke caved first. He started unravelling the cravat he’d had loosened earlier. It was stained, with blood and other substances, and now looked even more garish than its original yellow colour. He struggled with unbuttoning the tight, tiny buttons on his vest, and Jean stepped closer to help him.

Up close, Jean couldn’t help but notice that Locke was shaking. His fingers fumbled along the seams. When Jean took up the task of getting Locke out of his clothes, he noticed that his fingers were cold. He set his teeth tightly, and finished as quickly as he could, though the wet substances only made his job harder.

The white shirt underneath was a deep, dark red.

"How are you still conscious and able to complain about anything?" Jean wondered out loud, to distract himself from the worry he was feeling.

"I don’t know. Spite?"

"Very likely." Jean drew back the fabric slightly, and watched Locke grimace in pain. Just as he had suspected, the blood had glued the shirt to his wounds. He ripped it off without ceremony.

Locke yelped in pain. "Holy Lady of the Madness, Jean! A little warning?"

"Oops," Jean said, not sorry at all. The wounds looked awful, seeping with clear liquid, and even though they were only a few hours old, the edges were red and inflamed. Locke had scratches all over his torso, but the deepest wound was right over his shoulder and currently welling with fresh blood. His ribs looked bruised.

With careful hands, Jean felt for breaks, but they had thankfully passed the ordeal without shattering.

"You might want to look at my leg," Locke said through pressed teeth.

As he was already unlacing Locke’s trousers—which had also cost a fortune and were now ruined— he asked, "Why, is it broken?"

There was a cut, slicing the left leg of his outfit in two halves, but the light linen material ripped easily. Jean wasn’t worried until he saw the head of a crossbow bolt poking out.

"Motherfucker." The word came out without conscious thinking. "How did you even manage to get into the boat?"

Locke grimaced again. "Painfully."

"Well," Jean said. It couldn’t have been anything else. Why was the damn bonesetter not present? Why was there an emergency at dawn on the day of rest—well, Jean could see why there would be an emergency.

The kettle interrupted his musings, singing on top of the coals. At least the water was finally boiling, and they would need that, obviously. "You should have mentioned it," he told Locke, who shrugged. "We could’ve dealt with it in the city, cauterised the wound before you put weight on it."

"I didn’t think they had wounded me, back in the city. I only noticed the pain when we got to the boat."

Jean raised his eyebrows. "Tell me a better lie, so I might believe it."

Locke was silent, and that was a sign of danger in and of itself. Jean was gentle with his hands as he inspected the arrowhead. The wood had splintered, but none of the splinters were embedded deeply. The fragment that had gone deepest was the one containing the large head of the bolt. Jean hoped it hadn’t been coated with poison, but even leaving it in might lead to some lasting effect. If it was close to the artery, pulling it out might be equally dangerous, though. And a mistake would mean the difference between life and death.

Jean really didn’t know if he should try to extract it by himself, or if he should wait for the bonesetter after all.

"You would’ve gotten distracted," Locke said. "You’d have broken character."

"Broken character!" Jean shouted. "You damn well know I wouldn’t have! This is not my first dance! You— you fool." The insult was weak, lacked conviction, and was boring. Jean knew it, and yet: Locke hiding his injuries for a reason that weak wasn’t worth his good insults.

Instead, Jean turned around, quiet again. One of the rags hanging on the string looked clean enough, and so he dipped it into the hot water. He was going to pull out that bolt by himself, and the more it hurt Locke, well. There was no way to gentle a horse without ruining its spirit.

Locke was still white around his nose, and looked close to tears, but the latter was probably just another attempt at manipulation. He would be in a lot of pain, with wounds like that, the surface scabs combined with the deeper, more life-threatening injuries.

Jean searched around for the usual medical contraptions, tweezers, a knife, something—but the bonesetter had apparently taken that part of his inventory with him. There was nothing helpful lying around. Good or bad, he had to make do with what he had on him.

He took off his smallest knife and held it over the flame, then wiped it against another rag to clean of the soot.

"Are you angry?" Locke asked. Underlying his words was the assumption that Jean shouldn’t be.

Jean felt his shoulders tense and relaxed them forcefully. He was mad, and he had good reason to be. The only reason they were both still alive was because Jean had known that Locke would fuck up the basic courtesy of telling Jean the plan had changed as soon as a redheaded woman appeared, and he had been prepared for the fallout.

"Why is it always redheaded women, with you?"

Locke lay back on the furs, bleeding a bit still, probably ruining the furs with his stench. He looked away, and didn’t answer. Perhaps he didn’t know himself why he had done what he had. It didn’t make it better for Jean, of course, and it didn’t help with nursing his wounds, either.

The wound wasn’t getting better from him staring at it. “This is gonna hurt,” he told Locke, and gently cradled his leg. Locke was going to squirm, no question, because even though he dared everyone he’d ever met to punch him out, he’d never been all that fond of pain.

“Yeah,” Locke breathed out, and his eyes were already filled with tears.

Jean petted his leg in comfort.

Locke blinked, and gone were the tears. Instead, he shivered, so Jean gripped his leg more tightly. Then, he took the knife and opened the scab— the head of the arrow bolt was still sticking out, but now he could see where it had initially gone in. As gently as possible, he used the knife as a lever to push the metal out farther, until it was sticking out enough that he could just grab it with his fingers.

"Don’t move," Jean said, hoping to distribute the blame to Locke if it slipped through his fingers.

"That’s not what she said."

Jean already had it in his fingers. It came loose more easily than he had thought, bringing with it another well of blood. He pressed a hot rag to the wound, and then finally said, "For fuck’s sake, Locke."

He was the most obnoxious man Jean had ever met, and there was nobody in this godsforsaken place that he loved more.

"You’re the best friend a man could hope for. Your talent knows no bounds, your care-taking no equal, your bedside manner deserves all the accolades," Locke said. "Also, please get me out of the rest of these clothes, because they’re sticky and they stink like shit."

Jean could not let that opening go. "That’s what she said."

Locke laughed, as though he couldn’t have done anything else. It must have pained him, too, from the grimace on his face, but he was smiling again when he said, "I should get injured more often, if it gets you to treat me like this."

Jean didn’t poke him again, but he was sorely tempted. "Perhaps you should get injured less often, and maybe then I’ll treat you even better."

Locke looked at him—fondly, as if Jean had hung the moon. Then, he said, "You couldn’t possibly." He leaned forward despite his injuries, grabbed Jean by the lapels of his shirt—and then kissed him soundly.

Jean held his ground somehow. He wasn’t sure how the evening had gone from Locke flirting with his red-headed women, to being kissed in the hut of a bonesetter. He wasn’t complaining, though. He carefully adjusted his weight, then grabbed Locke more comfortably, so he didn’t have to put weight on his injured leg.

Between all the events of today, kissing Locke was the most surprising. There had been no warning. Jean hadn’t noticed a difference in behaviour; in fact, the only thing he had noticed was that Locke seemed to have developed a different pash for yet another red-head.

“What,” Jean managed to breathe against Locke’s mouth when he let go to further hitch himself up Jean’s arms.

“You’re the biggest idiot I’ve ever known,” Locke said. “Thank you for the rescue. You know, I wasn’t actually flirting with the—whomever’s—wife. I was flirting with _you_. Or trying to, anyway. She noticed and pitied me because you didn’t seem to react at all. What, were you jealous?”

Jean dropped him again. He aimed for the furs, but he was also thinking about dumping him in the river outside, so really, Locke should have been glad for his restraint. Maybe he’d tell him that. After he kissed him again.


End file.
